Video apparatuses such as television signal receivers often include motion detectors for adaptive video processing to facilitate functions such as frequency upconversion, data compression or line/frame combing. High quality motion detection for video signals such as National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) signals often involves sophisticated processing to correctly identify actual motion without falsely detecting motion due to the alternating phase of chrominance with respect to luminance on alternating video frames. As a result, motion detectors often include several control registers whose settings may be adjusted in order to optimize the performance of the motion detector for a particular application or condition (e.g., noisy video). Because of the complexity of motion detection, and the potentially large number of control registers associated with a given motion detector, it may be difficult for application circuit designers to optimize the control register settings of a motion detector. Accordingly, there is a need for a convenient means for enabling application circuit designers to determine the optimal control register settings for a motion detector in the product design environment.
One conventional approach for enabling application circuit designers to determine the control register settings for a motion detector is to overlay points of detected motion upon a video display. According to this conventional approach, the pixels in a video display that represent points of motion are replaced with black pixels. That is, those pixels of a video display that represent points of motion are displayed in black, while those pixels that do not represent points of motion are displayed in accordance with their original level of luminance. This conventional approach, however, is less than optimal since it uses single threshold and replacement values, and therefore indicates only whether motion is present at a given pixel, but does not indicate the degree of motion present at the given pixel. As a result, this approach is deficient in that it does not provide application circuit designers with a good indication of the degree of detected motion in a video display.
Accordingly, there is a need for an apparatus and method which avoids the foregoing problems, and thereby enables a video display that readily indicates the detected degree of motion and/or other video attribute present in the video display. The present invention may address these and/or other issues.